Man Who Posed as a Doctor at 18 Is Going to Prison at 20

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Malachi A. Love-Robinson was 18 when he was accused of practicing medicine without a license. He pleaded guilty to several charges on Thursday, and was sentenced to three and a half years in prison.CreditPalm Beach County Sheriff's Office

He wore a white lab coat and a stethoscope, but as several would-be patients in South Florida learned in 2015 and 2016, Malachi A. Love-Robinson was no doctor.

Mr. Love-Robinson, who was 18 when he was accused of practicing medicine without a license, pleaded guilty to several charges on Thursday, and was sentenced to three and a half years in prison. The charges included grand theft from a person over 65 — prosecutors said he stole money and checks from an 86-year-old woman he was seeing as a patient.

Now 20, he has spent the last 16 months in a county jail, and will get credit for time already served.

Mr. Love-Robinson’s story gained wide attention in 2016 after officials said he performed a physical exam and offered medical advice to an undercover agent. He had several run-ins with law enforcement as he repeatedly tried to pass himself off as a doctor, the officials said.

He owned and operated his own office, called New Birth New Life Medical Center & Urgent Care, in West Palm Beach, the local sheriff’s office said. Before that, he was arrested in October 2015 for practicing medicine without a license in Boynton Beach, Fla., and he was taken into custody in January 2015 after walking the halls of a hospital wearing a lab coat and a stethoscope.

In February 2016, he told The Times that the charges against him were “gut wrenching.”

“I’m not trying to hurt people,” Mr. Love-Robinson said in 2016. “I’m just a young black guy who opened up a practice who is trying to do some good in the community. If that is a negative thing, we have a lot more work to do in the community than to single out me.”

He said that he had a Ph.D. in another field from a “private Christian university,” but wouldn’t name the university or say what the field was. He had a certificate to provide alternative health care from the American Association of Drugless Practitioners, a group for holistic health professionals, but it does not allow people to diagnose or treat medical conditions.

He admitted to investigators that a diploma he displayed at the Boynton Beach clinic from Arizona State University was fake, according to The Sun Sentinel.

The newspaper reported that he had visited Anita Morrison, the 86-year-old woman, several times in West Palm Beach after she had complained of intestinal pain. Officials said he stole $34,504 from her checking account, using it to pay off auto loans and credit cards, and forged three checks totaling $2,794.

He pleaded guilty to three fraud charges, one charge of grand theft from a person over 65, one charge of grand theft of $300 or more, one count of practicing naturopathy without a license, one count of grand theft of $20,000 or more, and one count of obtaining property in exchange for a worthless check.

In an unrelated case, he pleaded guilty in March 2017 to making false statements to obtain credit and passing a forged document, according to The Sun Sentinel. The authorities said he was accused of buying a $35,000 Jaguar using his godmother’s name on a car loan application without her permission, and that he used her credit card to buy iPads and a cellphone.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Man Who Posed as a Doctor Gets 3½ Years in Prison. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe